A Fox Nation headline stated, "Obama Says U.S. Is a 'Muslim Country.' " However, the blog post to which the headline linked noted that President Obama said, "[I]f you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world."

On June 2, The Fox Nation featured a headline stating, "Obama Says U.S. Is a 'Muslim Country.' " However, the June 2 New York Times Caucus blog post to which the headline linked noted that, in fact, during an interview with French television station Canal Plus, President Obama said: "[I]f you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world."

As Media Matters for America has noted, personalities associated with Fox News -- which hosts the purportedly bias-free Fox Nation -- previously paraphrased or replayed Obama's April 6 overseas remarks, during which he made factual comments about religion in America, saying, in part, "we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation," and used those comments to criticize Obama. Fox News also previously falsely suggested that Obama is Muslim.

From The Fox Nation:

From Obama's interview with Canal Plus U.S. correspondent Laurence Haïm:

Q [...] Tomorrow we're leaving for the Middle East. It's going to be your first trip there. What do you want to achieve with this trip?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, we're going to be traveling to Saudi Arabia; I'll be having discussions with King Abdullah. And then we'll travel to Cairo, in which I am delivering on a promise I made during the campaign to provide a framework, a speech of how I think we can remake relations between the United States and countries in the Muslim world.

Now, I think it's very important to understand that one speech is not going to solve all the problems in the Middle East. And so I think expectations should be somewhat modest.

What I want to do is to create a better dialogue so that the Muslim world understands more effectively how the United States but also how the West thinks about many of these difficult issues like terrorism, like democracy, to discuss the framework for what's happened in Iraq and Afghanistan and our outreach to Iran, and also how we view the prospects for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Now, the flip side is I think that the United States and the West generally, we have to educate ourselves more effectively on Islam. And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslims Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world. And so there's got to be a better dialogue and a better understanding between the two peoples.

ABOUT OUR RESEARCH

Our research section features in-depth media analysis, original reports illustrating skewed or inadequate coverage of important issues, thorough debunking of conservative falsehoods that find their way into coverage and other special projects from Media Matters' research department.